Lead book review

We could begin almost anywhere. But let’s start in Ukraine, with Babar Aliev. Babar is a former gang leader who used social media disinformation campaigns to undermine a separatist movement. When his opponents won, he was picked up and put on a train out of town. His great disappointment, he tells Peter Pomerantsev in This is Not Propaganda, is that the separatists sent just three men for him. (Last time, he says proudly, there were three vans with Swat teams.) Today he is setting up ‘media literacy’ classes, helping people differentiate between true and untrue stories, reliable and unreliable sources.

Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a group of individuals from larger society with a wall and a controlling mechanism, all sorts of interesting facts about the way people interact become apparent. Convents, hospitals, asylums, schools, universities and prisons all serve the purpose. But different nations tend to prefer one sort of institution over another. It’s a curious fact that where the British will enter into a novel of school life with gusto, Americans show a distinct preference for writing about prisons.

In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front in the trolleybus queue. Complaining about this at some point, I was struck and shamed by a Russian friend’s reaction: ‘Oh, but it’s sad... Imagine how hard their lives have been, to make them like that.’ Last Witnesses consists of about 100 accounts by men and women who were children when the Nazis invaded. Without preface or context of any kind, their voices rise off the page — hesitant, desperate, terrified, matter of fact, poetic, bewildered. Their ellipses are loud with choked tears and still-raw fear.

On 14 October 1942, the 23 Swiss members of the International Committee of the Red Cross met in Geneva to decide whether or not to go public with what they then knew about Auschwitz and the Nazis’ extermination plans. When they emerged two hours later they had voted, almost unanimously, to remain silent. As did the US state department, the British government and the Vatican — all in possession of the same evidence of mass murder across German-occupied Europe. The reasons given ranged from the danger of reprisals against Allied PoWs to the need to focus on military targets, and thus shorten the war. And, most importantly, because of a profound unwillingness to believe what they had been told.

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course, but if one was drawing up a shortlist of men who might qualify as exceptions to the rule, then Philip Mansel’s ‘King of the World’, Louis XIV, would surely be very near the top.

At first glance, Laura Cumming’s memoir On Chapel Sands begins with what appears to be a happy ending. On an autumn evening in 1929, a small child is snatched from a Lincolnshire beach. Her name is Betty Elston and she is three years old. The girl’s mother, Veda, is happy to let Betty play on Chapel Sands, not far from the family’s cottage, keeping an eye on her from a distance. Veda’s attention wanders; when she looks back the toddler has disappeared. Panic sets in and the police are called; Betty has been kidnapped. A few days later, however, the little girl is found safe and well in a neighbouring village, wearing a different set of clothes. She has not been harmed but she has no memory of where she has been or who took her off the sands.

Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man. How to identify yourself to a potential partner? A confession might bring the police; dressing and carrying yourself in distinctive ways will invite ridicule or violence in the street. The solution is this: you casually remark to a stranger that the pub you are both in is ‘naff’. He looks up, and before you know it, you’re talking like this: ‘Pauline? Can’t swing a cat but hit a cove. She’s had nanti bully fake. Dyed her riah, her end’s a right mess.’ ‘Nanti bona. I hope she vaggeried straight to the crimper.’ ‘Well that’s where she’d been. The palone tried to give her an Irish. Moultee palaver.

The crusades are part of everyone’s mental image of the Middle Ages. They extended, in one form or another, from the 11th to the 16th century. Those which reached the Holy Land were fought by men on horseback wearing metal armour and carrying lances and swords, as in the pictures. The onset of gunpowder had not yet spoiled the fun. They were truly international, in their own way emblematic of the myth of a single Christian European polity. They embodied everything that people associate with medieval warfare: reckless courage, murder, loot, adventure and romance. Christopher Tyerman has been writing about the crusades for nearly 40 years. His work includes the only full-scale study of English crusaders and God’s War, which for my money is the best one-volume history in print.

In 2011, when the editor of Charlie Hebdo put Muhammad on the cover, he did so as the heir to more than 200 years of a peculiarly French brand of anti-clericalism. Just as radicals in the Revolution had desecrated churches and smashed icons, so did cartoonists at France’s most scabrous magazine delight in satirising religion. Although Catholicism was their principal target, they were perfectly happy to ridicule Islam too. If Jesus could be caricatured, then why not Muhammad? Sure enough, one year after the prophet’s first appearance on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, he was portrayed again, this time crouching on all fours and with his genitals bared.

I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression on account of their design: the great Tarkovsky Boris Godunov for Covent Garden; Hockney’s Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne; Es Devlin’s Les Troyens; the Richard Peduzzi Bayreuth Ring preserved on film. Very few others. For many opera-goers, an interventionist or bold visual approach to an opera is automatically a bad thing, and (I guess) a lot of the musicians involved are visually somewhat conservative. The ludicrous 1980s Met Ring cycle, designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen to follow every one of Wagner’s demands, was driven by musicians.

The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will recall the unedifying circumstances leading to his dismissal from BP ten years ago, when the country’s usual gang of disagreeable and unkindly figures such as Paul Dacre and Tom Bower were snapping busily at his heels. Much has happened since. In the classic style of the British establishment, his disgrace has been followed by a steady stalactitic drip of preferments and praise, committees and chairs and board memberships, much aided by quires of unctuous journalism, most tending to focus on the impeccable taste and artistic judgment (not to say financial savvy) with which he has furnished and stocked his digs in the fashionable quarters of London and Venice.

Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a kind of embalming fluid, it has long been suspected that they enjoy wielding their pens more like a cosh or a scalpel. Victorian writers were especially nervous about the prospect of a biographer prodding and slashing away at their reputations. Tennyson worried that he would be ‘ripped up like a pig’ after his death, and many of his contemporaries did all they could to present their best face to posterity: hand-picking an authorised biographer; making a bonfire out of any embarrassing letters; discreetly muzzling friends who might be tempted into unflattering reminiscences.

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the uncensored memories of his wives and mistresses, as well as George Packer’s own racy writing, makes this a fascinating and compulsive read.

Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the East India Company warned them off, citing difficulties of climate, disease, morality, religion and culture, a few managed to travel there all the same. By the late 18th century their numbers had increased considerably, making women some of the most interesting witnesses to the British Raj. In this way, the white Christian woman became a significant face of imperial rule. She would usually be caricatured as one who, having failed to find a husband in London, cast her lot in with the ‘fishing fleet’ in Bombay; or portrayed (by E.M.

The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation, be borrowed in a headline, or involve the name of one of the better-known characters; it might turn up in that most hollow of adjectives, Shakespearean. It has two possible modes. There is triumphalism drawn from the history plays: this sceptred isle, once more unto the breach. And there is tragic calamity: the betrayal by Brutus, Hamlet dithering. Nobody much invokes the comedies, perhaps because negotiations with the EU have not yet descended to cross-dressing.

I can only remember one page of any of the dozens of Ladybird histories that I read avidly as a child: an illustration of a scene from the Third Crusade, when Richard the Lionheart, at the head of his Christian army,  met Saladin, the leader of the Muslim forces, outside the port city of Acre in 1191. The picture does not show the battle but the two men comparing swords, like top level sportsmen discussing preferred bats or rackets. They were standing before a tent, broadly medieval in appearance. On the ground lay an iron bar, evidently chopped in half with a single blow from the great broadsword between King Richard’s mailed fists. A silk scarf floated in the air and Saladin, slender, saturnine and subtle, was preparing to slice it in half with his razor-sharp scimitar.

Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English composer who worked within established forms —symphonies, oratorios, string quartets, piano sonatas — to startlingly new effect. But his innovation was not just as a composer. He was also a political and social radical, embedded in Trotskyite, pacifist and gay rights ideas. The newness made itself known in a long attempt to find novel ways of living. Oliver Soden’s biography feels like an attempt to answer a series of questions. How, in the 20th century, should a creative artist live? Or be a pacifist? Or a homosexual? The answers were sometimes wrong; the music could be disastrously unsuccessful.

For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’ ‘Am I getting old?’ ‘Oh, no, not you.’ Memory plays us false, and it takes the skill of a sympathetic historian such as Virginia Nicholson to sift the evidence, written and oral, and unfold a story that is both plausible and sound. I look back to my 1960s life and think how many of us were metaphorically clothed in gold… how we strode through the years enjoying new freedoms, new loves, music, clothes, drugs, opportunities. I have in my time contributed to the myth of unalloyed pleasure, extolling the 1960s for the quickening pace of change, the broadening mood of happiness and hope.

In this careful study of the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity, John Barton, former Oriel and Laing professor of the interpretation of holy scripture at Oxford  University, tells us that the OUP sells a quarter of a million Bibles in the King James or Authorised version every year. He doubts if many of them are actually read by the people who buy them or receive them as presents, with the possible exception of one important group. In Britain and the US the churches that are bucking the trend of decline are usually those that take a conservative approach to the interpretation of the Bible; and for many of them the King James is the version they use. But not because of the beauty of the language.

Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon on the tricentenary of his birth in 2013 were ignored. He has not taken his place alongside Rousseau and Voltaire in the Parisian vaults of fame, even though he was no less radical or progressive. Instead, his name has been given to a metro stop in the 12th arrondissement: Reuilly-Diderot. Even here, he comes second, tacked on by a hyphen, one of history’s and philosophy’s also-rans. The injustice done to Diderot can partly be explained by the fact that he was a collaborative writer and thinker.